Fashion Spotlight: Narciso Rodriguez

The designer's quiet persona and artistic approach may seem at odds with his body-con designs, but as every smart (and many a famous) girl knows, when it comes to sensuous dressing, understatement is everything

Call him a master of form meets function, a thinking-woman's designer, a die-hard purist. But don't use the s word when describing his clothes. Never mind the fact that fans (and friends) such as Rachel Weisz, Claire Danes, Julianna Margulies, and Sarah Jessica Parker rarely look hotter than when their curves are poured into his razor-sharp designs—they're sensual, yes, but sexy? That's never been Narciso Rodriguez's goal. The designer says he's "old-school," meaning that he doesn't think the dress should ever overpower the woman. So if, say, Salma Hayek should happen to look even more smoldering than usual in one of his dresses, Rodriguez, ever the gentleman, would argue that's because of who the lady is, not what she wears.

Narciso Rodriguez launched his label in 1997 and wasted no time cementing his look: body-conscious, no-frills dresses and separates that take you from work to cocktails but are decidedly not made with silly cocktail swillers in mind. They're often color-blocked in black, white, and red (though, yes, he also loves color: offbeat hues like citrine, paprika, and celadon) and segmented with visible seams—darts being another dirty word in his vocabulary. From the start, his designs reflected the pared-down modernity of his former employer, Calvin Klein, but with the slick edge (and, dare we say, sex appeal) of an art-house aesthetic. They quickly established Rodriguez as the new face of American minimalism—a position he arguably still occupies.

Over the years, he formed and dissolved partnerships with Aeffe (manufacturers of Alberta Ferretti and Jean Paul Gaultier) and more recently, Liz Claiborne, both from whom he split (the decisions were mutual) over differences in opinion on how to build the brand. But as of spring 2010, Rodriguez had regained full ownership of his company and announced a pair of smart, entrepreneurial tactics: He would offer his always-coveted dresses at a more considerate price point (serving up some items at $1,000 as opposed to his usual $1,800) and had just inked a groundbreaking deal with eBay for a lower-priced line of eight pieces that would be sold exclusively to the online retailer's nearly 90 million active members. Spring was clearly the right time for Rodriguez to steal the limelight. When many other designers were returning to mindless frills and superficial femininity, the Narciso look—sleek, modernist shapes cut in ultraluxe fabrics—stood out. And this season (perhaps one of his best ever), with many designers unable to conjure a modicum of body-consciousness, his artfully cool, sensuous silhouettes are a first resort for women who want to look as smart as they act.

Rodriguez talks design with the rigor of a minimalist, focusing on line, shape, fabric, and construction, and he can get so absorbed in his intellectual process that he seems almost oblivious to how feminine and emotional the results can be. His inspirations are high-minded: the architecture of Eero Saarinen and Oscar Niemeyer, the sculpture of Richard Serra and Anish Kapoor. And his process owes a debt to Russian Constructivism: For fall, his designs started out one-dimensional, as abstract shapes—a balloon, a triangle—that he pieced together (hence their graphic purity). Collections, he says, tend to derive from a single instant in which he finds himself dumbstruck by the beauty of something—say, a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, a Thomas Ruff photograph, or his own photo of a boy sitting on a motorcycle with his helmet pushed back.

And yet, still youthful and soft-spoken at 49—to call the designer "unassuming" would be an understatement—Rodriguez bears not a trace of the artistic snob. "True design shouldn't be limiting," he says, and clothes shouldn't be uncomfortable. "I love T-shirts and things that move. Just because a dress is structured, whether it's cut close or loose, doesn't mean it should feel restrictive."

He is, at heart, still the son of Cuban immigrants from Newark, New Jersey (his father was a longshoreman). "I want to be a designer" were not the words his parents longed to hear—they thought he should be a lawyer or a dentist—but after much arguing, he landed at Parsons The New School for Design. In the '80s, he assisted Donna Karan at Anne Klein; in the '90s, he designed women's wear for Calvin Klein. There, he became best friends with a colleague, Carolyn Bessette. The minimal yet romantic sliver of bias-cut silk he designed for her 1996 wedding to John F. Kennedy Jr. landed Rodriguez (by that time working at Cerruti) on the map.

Brazil, where Rodriguez bought a home in Bahia in 2006, has proven fertile ground for inspiration. It supplied the aha moment for fall: scubaesque coats in bonded wool and silk neoprene and others cut in gray and white reversible double-face; asymmetric dresses; and a watery black, gray, and rust silk print inspired by the "mercury-like" finish of a friend's spray-paint work. "It was a very simple idea," Rodriguez says. "I took photographs of people I was following in Rio. At home, I printed them and turned them upside down. Shazam! There were the curves on the dress." Shazam? Rodriguez still describes his work with childlike enthusiasm, tending to modestly gloss over his own technical feats. But process is always at the front of his mind. He describes an orange dress from fall, an origami of collapsed circles, boxes, and triangles inspired by the shadows in the Rio photos: "I started cutting away from the fabric, against the grain, and suddenly I had these shapes—the collapsed circles created volume, and these tonal shadows added volume on top of that." He catches himself. "Okay, okay, it's not that simple. It's actually quite complex—but it starts out simple."

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